Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.The normal winter Saturday at the Omaha Sports Academy starts when managers arrive at 6:15 a.m. The last basketball games finish around 10 p.m.
In between, four or five games often go at once. At the height of activity, 300 to 400 people are shuffling in and out of its doors every hour.
"It's absolute chaos," said Bob Franzese, OSA general manager. "But it's controlled chaos."
Minor mayhem comes with any basketball game involving a 10- or 12-year-old dribbling a ball off his foot, covering the wrong man or occasionally taking one step too many. But it's exactly what Franzese and Jeff Epstein envisioned when they opened the Omaha Sports Academy near 120th and Maple Streets in July 2008.
And after some hard fouls and financial turnovers, OSA is thriving this winter. Its leagues are filled with more than 450 teams, ranging from first- and second-graders to eighth grade.
Omaha Sports Academy is front and center of a mini-explosion in facilities, underscoring an increased appetite for youth basketball in the city. Omaha may not be known as a hoops mecca — look at the relatively low number of Division I prospects each year — but its investment in the game appears stronger than ever.
It's not just OSA. Look at Nebraska Elite Sport & Fitness Complex (formerly the Westroads Club), which has 106 teams in its leagues this winter. The metropolitan area still has dozens of traditional leagues that play at smaller sites. But there's clearly a market for something more.
Loads of AAU experience took Franzese to many cities where he spent time in lots of basketball facilities. "We thought the same thing would work (in Omaha)," he said.
Originally, Franzese's group thought it would have to have programs such as volleyball and kids programs to supplement basketball. "But as we've grown, we've realized we're in the basketball business, and now that's 90 to 95 percent of what we do," he said.
It's also how OSA does it, Franzese said, that has helped it peak this winter with so many teams.
Franzese said the majority of coaches for the Omaha Sports Academy's 30 select teams are qualified coaches and not just parents. Its game officials are registered with the state of Nebraska and handled by an assigner. All games and scores, and even some statistics, can be tracked on its website.
OSA also runs about a dozen tournaments a year that bring in teams from around the Midwest. Because it has already outgrown its current setup — resulting in some games having to be played at gyms away from the OSA facility — expansion is a common topic in quarterly ownership meetings.
And in addition to OSA and Nebraska Elite making their impact, a person close to youth basketball in Omaha said the heads of two other programs are looking into the possibility of building multi-court or multi-sport facilities as well.
"I compare it to the old slow-pitch softball days in Omaha," said Brent Robinson, who assigns referees for Predator League games and tournaments for OSA. "There's just tons of basketball going on everywhere. There's such a demand right now, and what could be better?
"In the old days, you played in your driveway. Now everybody wants to be on a team, and there are a lot worse things kids could be doing."
The Omaha Sports Academy took over the old Predator League, and it now attracts teams that travel in from places such as Norfolk and Sioux City. OSA also features a select program and has developed travel teams, but also features gold, silver and bronze levels to separate those with varying skills.
Its top sixth-grade league includes a team co-coached by Eric Behrens and Josh Luedtke, the varsity head coaches at Omaha Central and Omaha Creighton Prep, respectively, whose sons play together.
Behrens said the additional value with OSA might be the opportunities it offers outside of the regular fall and winter leagues, as far as skill work and camps.
"In parts of Omaha, baseball is a year-round sport, soccer is a year-round sport and basketball is treated more like a November-through-March deal," he said. "To have some options there year-round, that part will certainly help.
"It's kind of hard to quantify what the long-term results will be, but it gives kids who want to work on their game an opportunity to do that."
Tony Carrow at Nebraska Elite Sport & Fitness Complex said his facility is more interested in developing some of its main teams than getting into big numbers. It will hold tryouts next month for its first traveling teams that will be Nebraska Elite Basketball.
With just two courts, he said, the 106 teams for winter seasons was "all we can take." Although the facility has the room to possibly expand and add courts, Carrow said that would depend on the direction Nebraska Elite decides to go with its teams.
Nebraska Elite is already known for its volleyball program, which feeds off the club's youth performance-enhancement area that Carrow said is one of the region's best.
"We've had a tremendously successful program in volleyball and really felt that we had something to offer in the organizational and developmental areas that could move into basketball," Carrow said.
"Running a league's great and it generates some income, but again our goal is to have an elite basketball program within our building. That's what we're going to be working on."
Of the Nebraska Elite lineup, Carrow said more than 50 boys teams are from the old Conqueror League.
The teams registering in OSA and Nebraska Elite have joined the more established leagues with the YMCA and PAL/CYO, and Kellom Youth League run by the City of Omaha. According to Bertie Plutschak of the Metro YMCA, the Y team numbers were actually slightly up for the winter season despite the influx of competition.
In many cases, teams will play in more than one.
Dave Dare, president of the athletic committee at St. Margaret Mary, said he didn't know if the newer leagues were having a huge effect on the Parochial Athletic League, but added: "I will say this, most teams that have talented kids, they're playing both."
At St. Margaret Mary, he said, when it comes to time or schedule conflicts, the "hard-and-fast rule" is that "if you're playing on a team over and above your St. Margaret Mary team, we expect your first priority to be to the St. Margaret Mary team."
At the Omaha Sports Academy, Franzese said five full-time staffers are joined on a given weekend by as many as 150 part-time staff when including referees, scorekeepers, concession workers and others. He said the OSA boom has been aided by a staff "not afraid to work, not afraid to develop relationships."
"I think people view us as the basketball capital of Omaha," he said. "Word of mouth can be a good thing but also a bad thing, and lucky for us it's been favorable. The stuff that goes on behind the scenes here is incredible."
Franzese said he took some tours of different facilities and crunched some numbers before deciding to build. He knew of some other facilities that just didn't make it.
And he admits there were some hard times out of the gate.
"You open up and you probably spend too much on the front end," Franzese said. "You start your full-time staff before you should, and you're playing catch-up. You guess what you're going to make off concessions, and then you don't. We learned a lot that first year."
Nebraska Elite Sport & Fitness previously had run only adult basketball leagues. It now features teams playing at the third- through eighth-grade levels — also with gold, silver and bronze levels — and will host its first fall league next October.
"We had done our homework and legwork prior to getting the courts complete," Carrow said. "We were fairly confident we would fill the league the first time out."
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